


we have history

by crookedsaint



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: 12x100, Constrained Writing, Exactly The Right Amount Of Reference To Real Historical Events, Excessive Reference To Historical Costume, Other, Vignettes, read: not a lot of reference at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28620162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookedsaint/pseuds/crookedsaint
Summary: One short day in sunny Mycenaean Greece.One short day in a crowded French square.One short day in their apartment in Seattle.(Twelve 100 word scenes about two immortals, the masks they wear, and permanence.)
Relationships: Luis Acevedo/Tot Clark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	we have history

**Author's Note:**

> format from lewis attilio's real baseball short stories, on medium as @pigeonize

**1.**

Tot inhales the sweet-rotten scent of pomegranate, fallen to earth. The sea journey has been long. Whether it was worth it remains to be seen.

Remains, of course, until someone with sun-darkened skin and eyes full of song played their first few notes, their lyre crying out for someone to listen. It isn’t that Tot feels unworthy to look—the concept of “worthy” is already old, tired. Perhaps he asks himself instead whether he is meant to. Whether it’s destiny that led him there, or a subversion thereof.

The song ends as soon as he looks back to meet those eyes.

**2.**

There is a kind of secrecy, a kind of shadow, that has to be cast over him now. A new name. Some new way to hide his face. The bandages, here, are those of the diseased, not the holy.

Those same eyes still find his in the dining hall, tracing a path across smoked fowl and stewed goat and other eccentricities of the new shore. They land on a mask, this time: leather, pressed and beaten into the face of a crow.

They wave a thin-fingered hand at him, and Tot sifts some courage from his cowardice to wave back. 

**3.**

This is an era of epithets, of titles, of eulogies, of biography. Tot’s anonymity is no longer such. The only mask still-opaque in the shine of this so-called rebirth is the arm of a more well-known figure. The mask of those song-bright eyes.

Luis, they are called now. They lace his doublet in another gesture of excess—an addictive motion, a kindness bestowed only on those with the taste for it. After, they tie the points of his sleeve, hands gentle as a dove-wing. 

“Are you really going to wear the bandages?”

“Finest silk. A gift from you. Why shouldn’t I?”

**4.**

It is different the next few times.

“That son of a—from my lips to God, if I find out like this—”

Perhaps it’s the knowledge of eternity that kills any love Tot could have of blood in his mouth. Of bit-back confession and of no consequences, of all the too-short love songs that wet his lungs.

“You’ll be alright. This has to have happened before, hasn’t it?”

It has, a thousand times, in a thousand lives, in a thousand ways.

The bandage draws tight across his chest. Too roughly to come from Luis’s hand—an unsuitable gift from such a suitor.

**5.**

France. The syllable still feels foreign in his mouth, especially in the local accent. Yet, the restlessness is familiar. This night, but an intermission between acts of war.

The rain soaks quickly through Luis’s chemise, the over-bundled cotton lawn suddenly heavy where before it was feather-light. It does much the same to Tot’s bandages.

“We’d better find somewhere to dry off.”

The lights of the square refused to dim.

“Or we could drop the charade. Dance like we’re young again.”

Luis grins. “When have we ever been young?”

Tot arches an eyebrow. “When has age stopped us before?”

They dance.

**6.**

“For all God’s love, just lace me in.”

“When has God showed you any particular affection?”

Luis glowers in the mirror, their stays hanging loosely. “I’m inflexible.”

“You said it, not I. Most ladies manage perfectly well.”

“Perhaps it’s the fault of my unladylikeness.”

“Many things are.” Tot twists the cord around his right hand nonetheless.

“You could stand not to wrinkle my shift so.”

“So I could.” He ties the end to the final eyelet. “And would you promise to take the same care with me?”

Luis fixes the places where the shift’s hem is caught. “Forever and always.”

**7.**

The promise, no matter how casual, is kept. Buttonholes are sewn with love in each silken stitch. Cravats are pinned with bits of gold and jewel snatched with stroking hand from wealthy patrons. And Luis still sings through it all, sings through felling shirt-hems and beating linens, through each hidden stitch of a collar and each thread of fine embroidery.

Tot has never tried to sing along. He dutifully works alongside, heating the irons, cutting the patterns—the larger, looser tasks. His wrapped fingers do not close around a needle the way they do around Luis’s hands.

He has never tried.

**8.**

The new camouflage is industrial finery: sagging coats and drooping skirt-hems, beading done by women unseen and shirt-collars left unstarched.

In an age of exposure, it becomes less charming to sit in a dark bar wrapped in your lover’s proxy-embrace. Perhaps it’s on-the-nose. Cotton in excess, in the excess of the Cotton Club. Draped in the tradition of pharaohs when those around you wear dyes sold as “Nile green.”

Even still, habits are hard to break. One yet harder is to tear his eyes away from Luis.

It is a warm thing, he decides, to be hidden in their shadow.

**9.**

“I know how, you know.”

Luis looks up at him, gaze the same challenge as always. “Sure. You really wanna tie your own tie? Go on, give it a few hundred tries.”

“I don’t see why I have to wear it.”

“You  _ could _ go for charming rogue. Greasers tend to show a bit more skin, though.”

Tot pulled a face. “Fine. Show me off. Not like that’s anything new.”

“What is, anymore?”

He leaned back onto the doorframe in defeat. “Do what you want with me, just leave the girl alone.”

“Oh, there’s another woman I should be worried about?”

**10.**

He doesn’t know how he settled for a mask other than this. To be held in by anything else would be infidelity at this point. Luis hums, the tune blurring with the buzzing tone that accompanies them. Hands now lighter-than-air tuck in the last bandage-edge. They brush against his collarbone. Cheeky.

They step back to admire their work. “I’m tired of Seattle.” 

Always the non-sequitur. “Want to move back East?”

“As if.” 

Tot presses forward, unwilling to leave space between them. Static dances up his arm from where their hands meet. “Things will change soon.”

“For the better?”

“As if.”

**11.**

The night has never sat heavier on Tot Clark’s still-sore shoulders.

Rain hangs in the air, miles overhead, ready to pour but holding back the tears a few minutes longer. His left arm aches. 

He cannot bring himself to unwrap it.

There have been separations across continents before. A new curiosity in the far east of the Caucasus that demanded attention Tot couldn’t muster. Something to the south, in a country of which Tot still knew the ancient tongue, of which he’d never mastered the new fashions.

None had felt like the last.

He cannot bring himself to unwrap it.

**12.**

This time, it is pouring. Blood is washed into every storm drain. Surely turning the Sound red, he thinks—until he stops thinking altogether.

It’s worse when they’re dirty. When he stares at the marks they leave, when his idle hands cannot help but smear and smudge the residue, when his head is full of pounding  _ rain  _ and nothing but. 

When the hands are too warm, too slow. When they are radio-static-fuzz, not amp-with-no-input. When there is no sound but sound itself. When the rain will not stop for him to breathe.

Arturo Huerta is deathly silent as they are forgotten.


End file.
